Optimizing the Board Meeting Agenda

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As board portal tools streamline—or in some cases completely eliminate—administrative tasks on the board’s meeting agenda, valuable meeting time is recaptured for the board to focus on core fiduciary duties. A well-structured meeting agenda leverages that additional time to maximize productivity in the boardroom.

In the first post of this five-part series of whitepapers designed to help Chief Governance Officers build a better governance framework, Joan Conley, Nasdaq Senior Vice President and Corporate Secretary, shares the essential elements of an effective board agenda.

Each company’s optimal board agenda is dependent upon a variety of factors, including how often the board meets, how long the board meets, and how prepared board members typically are. At Nasdaq, we find that these variables can be transcended by making executive and chairman sessions standard protocol for each meeting. We also utilize an extended agenda for every board and committee meeting.

Board meeting agendas at Nasdaq are of course built within the company’s secure board portal, where they are accessible to the board (and committee) chairs and archived as part of the corporate record. Nasdaq’s playbook for creating an effective board agenda includes the following essential elements.